Tag Archives: how to write

I have a process that I tend to follow book after book. I’m stubborn, and a creature of habit. Having written all four Thieftaker and all three Fearsson books largely by following my regular creative routine, I fully expected that this book would behave and let me write it the same way. But like children, not all books are the same; some listen better than others.

Quick-Tip Tuesday has rolled around again, and I have my usual post up at Magical Words. This week I’m discussing the value of breaking out of our creative routines in order to infuse our work with something fresh and new. You can find the post here. I hope you enjoy it.

Overtelling, pointing out the already obvious, undermines our writing. In a sense, “Trust your reader” is another way of saying “Trust yourself.” Err on the side of telling too little. Let your story speak for itself. And if your Beta readers or your editors don’t understand something, they’ll let you know and you can bolster the narrative with a bit more exposition.

Today on the blog tour, I stop by to visit with the wonderful Melissa Gilbert. My post on Melissa’s site (The Enchanted Alley) is on things I’ve learned in my years as a professional writer. You can find the post here, along with more information about my LonTobyn Chronicle, which I have edited and re-released . I hope you enjoy the post, and I hope you’ll check out the books!

I usually write with a good deal of structure in my process, and so I thrive on relatively unstructured music to inspire my creative process. So, I thought, what if with this project, to which I’ve taken a relatively unstructured approach, I listen to classical music and use that high level of musical structure to impose some order on my writing?

My apologies for this going up so late. I’m on the road and didn’t have access to the internet for much of the day. But today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post at Magical Words is now up and ready for viewing. It’s about a couple of lessons I learned last week while attending a phenomenal concert. One concerns sharing works-in-progress with audiences. The other focuses on the ways in which the music we listen to as we write can influence our creative process. You can find the post here. I hope you enjoy it.

By the time we hit that 60-70% mark, things look dire for our good guys.

And at that point we often discover that we have no idea how to get from where we are — often a world gone to shit — to the happy ending we’ve intended to write all along. There seems to be this unbridgeable chasm between the story as it exists, and the final product as we’ve envisioned it. Cue panic.

So how do we imbue our prose with emotion? Well, we DON’T do it with a sledge hammer. I am not telling you to bludgeon your readers with paragraphs-long explorations of your characters’ emotions. That would be no better than a data dump. Sometimes all we need is a gesture or moment’s expression — the twitch of a lip, a nervous gesture with the hands, the refusal to look someone in the eye. Delving into emotion doesn’t mean eschewing subtlety.

Today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post is up at Magical Words, and it’s about imbuing our writing with emotion. To my mind, few things are more important for effective story telling. Read more here. Enjoy, and keep writing!

I’ve noticed an incredible amount of extra verbiage in my early books — filler, if you will: superfluous words that add little to the storytelling, but clutter up my prose. For the wordiness-intolerant, these words are as unwelcome as, well, Wonder Bread at a luncheon for the gluten-adverse. How much is “an incredible amount”? In Children of Amarid, book I, I cut 20,000 words without touching plot, character, or setting.

It’s another Quick-Tip Tuesday over at the Magical Words blog site. Today’s post is about self-editing, and specifically finding ways to tighten up our prose. I’m editing my first series, the LonTobyn Chronicle, for re-release later this year, and I’m doing a LOT of cutting and tightening, so this is definitely on my mind right now. Find out what I’m thinking as I edit my work. You can read the post here.

We never know when we’re going to draw upon experiences in our lives, be it for setting or character, plot or emotional content, dialog or action or romance or any of the myriad other narrative elements that come, at least in part, from our own lives.

We writers are pack rats. We hoard everything. Maybe not in a physical sense (though I’m that kind of pack rat, as well), but certainly in a conceptual sense.

It’s Quick-Tip Tuesday over at Magical Words and I have a post up today about travel, experience, and turning memory into narrative. I’ve been drawing on my own travel experiences for my fiction for nearly twenty years, and as we move into summer travel season, it strikes me as a good time to discuss such things. The post can be found here. I hope you enjoy it.

But simply adding a character isn’t always enough. Sure, a love interest can spice things up, or a new villain can ratchet up the tension. But sometimes what a story needs is both more subtle than those options, and also more dramatic.

This week’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post is up at Magical Words. Today we’re talking about adding characters to our stories to shake things up a bit and infuse energy into our narratives. The piece was inspired by watching an old Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. It’s called “Quick-Tip Tuesday: What We Can Learn From Ro Laren.” I hope you enjoy it.

The writing profession throws plenty of trials our way; we shouldn’t pile on with unrealistic goals that we can’t possibly meet.

And the great thing about making writing a part of your regular routine is that you don’t have to set unreachable goals in order to accomplish great things.

It’s Quick-Tip Tuesday over at Magical Words, and I’ve got a new post up about setting realistic expectations for our work. Too often, aspiring writers undermine their confidence by setting goals for themselves that they can’t possibly meet. Read my take on this here. Enjoy the post, and keep writing.

There is a sort of alchemy that takes place when we manage to convert our own emotions into the different-but-related emotions of our characters. Spinning gold from that straw carried me through my grief. Had I given in to the temptation not to write, that book never would have been as good, and I don’t think my creative development would have followed the same trajectory.

Quick-Tip Tuesday is here again, and I have my post up at Magical Words. Today, I’m writing about whether or not writing every day is a good idea. It’s a more complicated question than it may seem. I don’t necessarily think we need to write each day. But we should. Although not EVERY day. But yeah . . .